Milkweed Editions and the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation are pleased to announce the establishment of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry.

This annual regional prize—open to poets currently residing in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, or Wisconsin—will award $10,000 as well as a contract for publication to the author of the winning manuscript. Finalists for the prize will be selected by 

the editors of Milkweed Editions, with the winner to be selected by an independent judge who will be named annually and chosen from among the ranks of eminent regional and national writers. The first annual prize-winning collection of poems will be announced in April 2012 and published in November 2012.

This year, the judge will be Peter Campion, the author of two collections of poems, Other People (2005) and The Lions (2009), both from the University of Chicago Press, as well as a monograph on the painter Mitchell Johnson, published in 2004 by Terrence Rogers Fine Arts. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Minnesota, and lives in Minneapolis.

Milkweed Editions is one of the nation’s leading independent publishers, with a mission to identify, nurture and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it. The Lindquist & Vennum Foundation was established by the Minneapolis-headquartered law firm of Lindquist & Vennum, PLLP, and is a donor-advised fund of The Minneapolis Foundation. This partnership between Milkweed Editions and the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation will celebrate poets for their artistic contributions, and bring outstanding regional writers to a national stage.

For more information regarding eligibility and submission, please visit the Lindquist & Vennum Prize page on our website.